This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

In ‘Cancer Alley,’ one woman fights back

A notorious industrial corridor along the Mississippi River in Louisiana may be poisoning the environment. Wilma Subra is trying to make sure it doesn’t.

Residents of Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' — which stretches along the Mississippi from New Orleans to Baton Rough — breathe whatever is belched from more than 150 industrial facilities. (Shannon Stapleton / REUTERS)

The investigators were trying to understand who might have fired a gun at the diminutive grandmother.

Enemies?

Wilma Subra could arrange them alphabetically, or geographically, or in descending order according to how much her work as an environmental chemist had cost them in money or public embarrassment.

Article Continued Below

She had gone after so many corporate polluters over the decades, the question had too many possible responses.

Authorities never found the person who shot at her while she was working at her desk by the front window. The soft-spoken crusader put bars on her windows, moved her desk to the back of the house — and kept going.

Seven years later, at 69, Subra is still working to rein in environmental degradation in Cancer Alley, an eye-watering corridor of more than 150 industrial facilities along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Together they produce a quarter of the petrochemicals in the U.S.

She’s a winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant who totes her grandchildren to public hearings, giving them crayons to scribble on the back of scientific papers. She’s a fighter who has taken on refineries, chemical manufacturers and oil and gas companies, including BP over its cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010.

Most important, admirers say, she’s a dedicated enabler, teaching people in some of the nation’s poorest communities to help themselves by using technology to track air and water quality in their own backyards.

“What separates Wilma from other scientists is she’s taking it to the next step, allowing communities to have a voice,” says Robert Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie, about the South’s toxic environmental legacy. “She makes real change on the ground.”

No money to leave

Subra has lived in the oilpatch her whole life. When she bumps into people she grew up with or attends class reunions with her husband, Clint, she sees two sets of people in the room: “The ones who look their age and the ones who look so old.”

The old-looking ones work in oil and gas or the chemical plants, she says. “You can clearly see the difference — the pallor of their skin, how shrivelled.”

Subra understands that people live near chemical plants because they don’t have the money to leave, and the workers won’t leave because of the money they can make.

“The guys who work in the plants will tell you they know it killed their dad,” she says. “They know it killed their mom because the dad came home with contaminated clothing and the mom washed the clothes.

“But I’ll tell you what, they don’t want their children working in the plants.”

Exhausted towns huddle along the two-lane blacktop that skirts the Gulf Coast. They are known as “fenceline communities,” because residents breathe whatever spews from the nearby smokestacks and drink what the companies release into the local water supply.

“My goodness, look at that,” Subra says, pointing at a belching smokestack and reeling off a list of the chemicals wafting into a light blue sky.

Subra drives past a large, boxy facility surrounded by barbed wire, pointing out the Gulf South Research Institute where she worked for 14 years doing pharmaceutical and biotech testing for private businesses and the federal government.

Since then, she has worked as an EPA contractor as part of an emergency response team sent to toxic spills and other disasters to perform quick assessments. She’s now helping the federal agency develop water toxicity tests for the regulation of hydraulic fracturing.

Subra has a business — commercial chemical analysis — that she neglects. The work that compels her is the pro bono help she has given to poor communities exposed to toxins.

“If it’s an affluent community, you will have people with money who will speak out, who will have connections,” Subra says. “The minority and the poor, for the most part, don’t have a voice.”

The energy industry, in particular, has frequently been across a corporate conference room from Subra. Tom Stewart, executive vice president of the Ohio Oil & Gas Association, calls Subra “a ferocious advocate.”

“She worries people on my side of the fence because she’s very well-respected, and therefore she’s effective,” says Stewart, who has worked with Subra during reviews of state oil and gas regulations. “We don’t always see eye to eye. However, I hold her in very high regard.”

‘Did we do this?’

More than once, Subra says, she has been in a legal proceeding, sitting across from an oil company executive who dismisses her reports of widespread illness as “hysterical.” She then receives a call from that executive at night, anxiously detailing the rashes and breathing problems experienced by his own children.

“Did we do this?” they want to know. Subra quietly explains which chemicals might be to blame and what information to give the family’s doctor.

One of Subra’s worst-case scenarios is Mossville, which has the densest concentration of industrial facilities of any region in Louisiana.

Companies there manufacture vinyl chloride, which produces dioxin, a group of chemicals so nasty the U.S. government requires reporting on any dioxin release. The World Health Organization categorizes dioxins as hormone disrupters, carcinogenic and environmentally persistent — meaning the chemical accumulates in the food chain.

People in Mossville called Subra last year to find out what was making them so sick. Her testing showed that residents’ blood dioxin levels were three times the national average.

She found dioxins in attic dust, in the dirt in residents’ yards, in the fruits and vegetables and nuts in their gardens, in the fish they caught. She conducted tests and traced the chemical fingerprint back to a single industrial plant.

The state environmental quality agency came to Mossville to hold hearings — a company wanted a permit to build another plant. Subra presented her scientific evidence and local residents trooped forward, coughing and reporting their health problems.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com